Docker & VMware: 1 + 1 = 3

Today at VMworld we’re excited to announce a broad partnership with VMware. The objective is to provide enterprise IT customers with joint solutions that combine the application lifecycle speed and environment interoperability of the Docker platform with the security, reliability, and management of VMware infrastructure. To deliver this “better together” solution to customers, Docker and VMware are collaborating on a wide range of product, sales, and marketing initiatives. Why join forces now? In its first 12 months Docker usage rapidly spread among startups and early adopters who valued the platform’s ability to separate the concerns of application development management from those of infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and operations. Docker gave these early users a new, faster way to build distributed apps as well as a “write once, run anywhere” choice of deployment from laptops to bare metal to VMs to private and public clouds. These benefits have been widely welcomed and embraced, as reflected in some of our adoption metrics:

In its second year, Docker usage continues to spread and is now experiencing mass adoption by enterprise IT organizations. These organizations span a wide range of industry verticals including finance, life sciences, media, and government. By leveraging the Docker platform, ecosystem, and the more than 30,000 “Dockerized” apps on Docker Hub, these enterprise IT organizations are radically reducing the time from develop to deploy – in most cases, from weeks to minutes. In addition to pipeline acceleration, they get the flexibility and choice to run these apps unchanged across developer laptops, data center VMs, bare metal servers, and private and public clouds. Not surprisingly, Docker’s enterprise IT customers have been making significant investments in VMware infrastructure for years across their application lifecycle environments, from developer laptops to QA servers to production data centers. They’ve come to trust and rely on its reliability, security, and quality. Through this partnership, now they can realize the agility and choice benefits of Docker on top of the VMware infrastructure they know and trust. Better Together The partnership spans a wide range of product, sales, and marketing initiatives, and today we’re excited to share early details with the Docker community.

Docker-on-VMware. The companies are working together to ensure that the Docker Engine runs as a first-class citizen on developer workstations using VMware Fusion, data center servers with VMware vSphere, and vCloud Air, VMware’s public cloud.

Contributing to Community’s Core Technologies. To support the joint product initiatives, VMware and Docker will collaborate on the Docker community’s core technology standards, in particular libcontainer and libswarm, the community’s orchestration interoperability technology.

Interoperable Management Tooling. So as to provide developers and sysadmins with consistent deployment and management experiences, the companies are collaborating on interoperability between Docker Hub and VMware’s management tools, including VMware vCloud Air, VMware vCenter Server, and VMware vCloud Automation Center.

In addition to the above product-related initiatives, you’ll start to see VMware introducing Docker to its users through its marketing and sales channels. In parallel, Docker will begin introducing VMware to the Docker community. There’s obviously a lot more to come from the Docker and VMware relationship, so today’s announcement is just the first step of what will be a fantastic journey. Please join us in welcoming VMware to the Docker community and working together with them to spread the goodness of Docker to even more users and platforms. Dockerize early and often, – The Docker Team Docker & VMware: VMworld Sessions There are several VMworld sessions discussing Docker + VMware. We look forward to seeing you!